student needs help with archgis

rmartori

Posted 14 March 2012 - 08:26 PM

rmartori

Newbie

Validated Member

7 posts

United States Minor Outlying Islands

I am taking an archaeological science class and my project is to map out the various obsidian tool sites found in italy.I found a tutorial for using lat and long information in an excel file to map out the points so I made a small test file to teach myself how to do it.

The problem is as best as I can tell its only projecting one set of coordinates so instead of in Italy all the dots end up across the equator.

This has been a slightly frustrating problem for me because if I cant map 20 I have no clue how I'll map 900.I am using Archgis 10 and I followed this tutorial http://www.lib.unc.e...gis/faq/xy.html

so far I've had two outcomes, either it places all the dots at 0.0 or it will just display longitude and nothing else.it wouldn't let me upload an excel file so a copy and paste is the best I can do. any help that you can give would be appreciated.

frax

Posted 15 March 2012 - 02:45 AM

This shouldn't be difficult, and should work without problems - I do it all the time. Make sure you choose the right columns for x/y latitude/longitude though. I was thinking for a moment that it could be a problem with decimal comma/dot (don't know what locale you are in), but then it wouldn't display as you describe.

When the dots display along the equator (the y-coordinate is obviously not displaying properly) are they in the right x-position? (along the equator, but right underneath Italy/France etc?)

rmartori

Posted 15 March 2012 - 07:16 AM

rmartori

Newbie

Validated Member

7 posts

United States Minor Outlying Islands

This shouldn't be difficult, and should work without problems - I do it all the time. Make sure you choose the right columns for x/y latitude/longitude though. I was thinking for a moment that it could be a problem with decimal comma/dot (don't know what locale you are in), but then it wouldn't display as you describe.

When the dots display along the equator (the y-coordinate is obviously not displaying properly) are they in the right x-position? (along the equator, but right underneath Italy/France etc?)

well weird thing I could not simply select identify then click on a point I had to click and drag and select every pointwhen the identify box then came up it only displayed one entry for France, however the site name and latitude were omitted.hopefully two screen shots help

Posted 15 March 2012 - 08:51 AM

Everything looks ok to me. As Frax mentioned make sure the input columns for x and y are correct for Lat and Long. Since you have named your columns Latitude and Longitude Arc should do this automatically.

The only other area where I can think you might run into trouble is in setting the reference system for the x,y data. You need to be sure you are setting the projection and coordinate system to the one the data are currently in, not what you may want it to be later. Where did you get the coordinates from, Google Earth, Wikipedia? You'll need to match their output coordinate system (WGS84 in the case of Google Earth).

If you're not already, something else to try is to create the new XY feature class in a blank ArcMAP document. Open ArcMAp and follow the procedures for adding XY data first, before adding any base layers to visualize the data over.

rmartori

Posted 15 March 2012 - 02:36 PM

rmartori

Newbie

Validated Member

7 posts

United States Minor Outlying Islands

Sadly ev en a blank map didnt work it still displayed it the same way.
however I decided to try and for lack of a better term cheat. after that failed I basically loaded up the world template and tried to join my xy sheet with the generic city list the world template gives, interestingly when I did that and then opened the xy sheet the site and the latitude were but labeled <null>

I think for some reason whenever I try and make xy data it is deleting those two columns

rmartori

Posted 27 March 2012 - 04:28 AM

rmartori

Newbie

Validated Member

7 posts

United States Minor Outlying Islands

sadly I am at my wits end with this issue, nothing I do seems to work.okay step by step, I start up arcmap 10 select new map, and world plate carea then select add xydata and select one of my excel files, I tried making a csv but when I did that it wont let me select X and Y when I load it up, I tried doing a simpler file this time, just of list of the volcanoes. I select the same style as the generic map, world plate caree combined with wgs 1984 in fact one or twice I removed the world plate caree and jsut used wgs 1984 and no change in the error

Basically as you can see from the coordinates of the mouse it is displaying them at the completely wrong coordinates. I have tried in xls dbf and cvs...which cvs wont even let me display at all.

I am running out of options and time....at this point I ask...since there are not many points is there anyway to do this manually? literally place a dot where I click then combine all those dots into one layer? Because honestly I don't know what else to do.